Promoting Quality Townscape & Architecture
Using the town’s heritage as a foundation for coherent, characterful development.
Creating high-quality homes, shopfronts, street-scapes, and spaces.
Birkenhead’s Georgian New Town grid has remained remarkably intact for over two hundred years, providing a valuable and adaptable foundation that will support the regeneration of surrounding areas today. Its quality makes it rich with potential, offering a unique opportunity to re-establish this as a contemporary ‘New Town’.
Framing Iconic Birkenhead
Birkenhead’s townscape is defined by the Laird grid and its sweeping views across the town and Liverpool’s Waterfront. The panoramas of Birkenhead’s docks and the Mersey, with visiting ships from around the world, are iconic. This vast scale contrasts with the intimacy of the town’s streets and spaces such as Market Street where a human scale creates a sense of homeliness. These dramatic shifts in scale and perspective are ‘surreal’, making Birkenhead the perfect stage for bold new icons. Linking with the thread of blending park with town, Birkenhead could become a vast open-air sculpture gallery creating an unforgettable destination with huge visitor appeal.
Yards are another defining feature of Birkenhead. Future Yard and START-YARD have already embraced this iconography. Beyond shipyards, the grid creates a network of residential, working, public, and private
courtyards. Borough Yard, the urban ‘garden’ village emerging on the former gasworks, builds on
this concept. Extending the grid, blending park and town, and creating a series of private and public yards will weave a new town tapestry, complete with iconic micro parks and gardens.
The Wirral Waterfront, home to the country’s ‘longest promenade’, offers an opportunity to create a counterpart to Liverpool’s. Complementing this, the unique subterranean Dock Branch Park could ‘splash
out’ into the town, bringing biodiversity upwards, truly ‘blending park with town’. ION – Borough Yard
A less car-dominated, more people-focused urban landscape can flow through the streets and spaces of the grid, cultivating a distinct Birkenhead character. This landscape would serve as the glue that binds the town’s streets, parks, squares, and waterfront into a coherent whole.
Birkenhead is defined by its history, streets, and sweeping views over the Mersey. Preserving its unique
character means more than protecting buildings. It requires thoughtful blending of old and new. Every
renovation, development and space offers an opportunity to honour the past while creating future heritage.
Growing a Characterful Town
Birkenhead’s 19th-century New Town heritage provides a strong foundation for a ‘Renaissance New Town’, supported by the Council’s brownfield-first policy. Protecting and enhancing the Laird Grid through sensitive development and incorporating the concept of yards will merge historic character with contemporary needs. Introducing light touch Design Coding will guide appropriate development and ensure coherence and quality.